In 2013, we visited Playas, New Mexico, a ghost town transformed into
a staging ground for law and enforcement and the military to enact
dramas from the war on terror. Constellations Over Playas maps both our
real road trips through the region, and journeys
through the imaginary southwest that we found in stories, myths, and
the cinema. Beneath the paved roads that we travelled, we uncovered
other buried pathways that led to forgotten stories, ghostly presences,
and uncanny similarities. The project uses resemblance
as a modality for thinking outside the neoliberal paradigm of constant
war and limitless expansion. The town of Playas forms a central node in a
series of constellations of visual association assembled as a spell to
exorcise the specters of the American West.